Frequently Asked Questions

Updated on 5 January 2024

Do you provide catering?

In remote sessions or single-client, in-house sessions, we obvisouly don’t.

For in-room multi-client sessions, you bet we do. Start with a breakfast even better than at home (Nespresso® coffee, fresh orange juice, fresh fruits, fresh mini-French pastries…), and lunches at a variety of cool, delicious restaurants.

That being said, in-room multi-client sessions are not scheduled to re-open before at the very least March 31, 2022.

Do you provide computers?

No we don’t. As our “Logistics” sections (in the training pages) state, every trainee must bring their own laptops (be it personal, professional, loaned by a relative or what have you).

In practice, this has never been a blocker, except when said laptop ends up being an antediluvian or low-end model dished out by an IS department that doesn’t care, which means the trainee spends half their day shaking their fist at the poor thing; but that’s not exactly our fault…

If we did provide computers, these would automatically be Apple laptops with French Apple keyboards, and for many trainees used to PC keyboards on Windows or Linux, this would just add to their confusion.

My Wi-Fi is broken, do you have Ethernet available?

If your computer is that far gone, we feel for you; and yes, when we host you, we do have a router and RJ45 cables. But sob.

Will I get some course material?

Absolutely. All our training courses come with super-rich, diverse-form material.

At the beginning of every period in the training session, trainees get access to related slides and supporting material, usually in a web-based format, so they can easily follow along. Depending on the course, supplemental material can be provided, such as:

• access to an interactive lab for online exercises
• starter repositories for situational Git exercises
• starter depositories for common-theme applications trainees will flesh out throughout the session
• demo/starter codebases for machine-local exercises
• URLs of specific websites on which to perform a particular type of analysis

Once the training is done, they also get:

• an extremely content-rich debrief e-mail,
• a reference archive, accessible online for a short period of time, specific to their session, that may contain:
  • full slides (course material) for their course,
  • starter code and detailed solutions for every exercise in the session,
  • finalized, documented and tested codebases for the common-theme app that was fleshed out in the session, if applicable,
  • possible complementary resources (slides, demos and examples, etc.)

Can your trainees provide feedback?

You bet they can, they even must!

As soon as the training session ends (on that very evening or the next business day), trainees receive, in their debrief e-mail, a “hot” survey questionnaire that can be filled online and covers a number of areas. It is critical that they fill that in soon. They can also reply to that e-mail to submit a testimonial for the course they took.

About a month later, we send them a “cold” survey, similar to the previous one but more focused on hindsight and tangible results in their production work.

We carefully read and compile their replies, not just to track some key performance indicators that we publish online in our training pages (e.g. satisfaction rates: overall, teaching skills, tech expertise, resources used…), but more importantly to snatch great suggestions for improving our stuff!

We also send decision makers (people who requested the training, e.g. CTOs, product owners, tech leads), roughly 3 months after the session, a specific survey with a more strategic outlook and ROI notions.

Finally, should one of our trainees, after having attended an entire session, feel so frustrated that they wish to file a formal complaint, we have a process in place and a specific online form available, which are clearly mentioned in our post-session communication.

You can find a bit more info on all this in the relevant section of our training walkthrough page.

Should I setup my computer ahead of time?

Generally you do, especially to upgrade stuff you might have installed a long time ago. We provide full setup details in the summons emails.

What does a typical day look like?

Depends on your format. All times below are Europe/Paris times. Multi-client online sessions can use any of three schedules:

• Most sessions not exceeding 14 hours of training are split across afternoons spanning 14:30–18:00.
• Sessions of 21 hours use 5 afternoons spanning 13:48–18:00.
• Other sessions use our regular 7-hour day schedules, which span 9:45–18:00.

For full days, you get a 90-minute lunch break, usually 12:30–14:00. Afternoons also geat a 20-minute break midways.

As much as possible, we try and let you go a bit earlier on the last day.

What does the whole training experience look like?

We cooked up a detailed walkthrough of our training sessions, it even has its own page!

Do you do in-house training?

Should you insist on it, yes. However, such sessions carry a flat rate for training costs, which may make them less attractive if you’re located not too far from us and have only a few people to train. Obviously, an in-house has other significant benefits:

• Trainees are in their usual work environment.
• Talks, conversations, explorations and advice all focus on topics directly relevant to the company.

As a rule of thumb, a non-customized in-house training makes direct financial sense for out-of-Paris-area companies (still in France) starting at about 4 trainees. For companies in the Paris area, it is more like 7–8 people.

The hosting venue must be able to guarantee proper health & safety, however (e.g. social distancing, mandatory masks and other safety precautions, frequent disinfection of surfaces, etc.).

How many trainees are there in a session?

For multi-client trainings at our venues, we reserve the right to cancel sessions—no later than 7 days ahead—if we don’t meet a quorum of at least 3 trainees.

Both in-house and multi-client sessions cap off at 10 trainees, in order to maximize the training/teaching quality.

Do you train in English / outside France?

If we didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this page in English, would you? 😊 We can absolutely do that, and have on many occasions. For instance, we trained in Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Serbia, Romania and the U.S.

If you want to have us train abroad, talk to us! We’d be especially delighted to train in Montréal, New York, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin, København, Stockholm, Barcelona, Kraków, 香港, Singapore, 東京, Sydney and Cape Town, to name only these.

Who’s my trainer?

It all depends on the session. At the time of this writing (September 13, 2021), the potential trainers are:

• 360° Git: Maxime (generally) or Christophe
• Modern Web Apps: Maxime or Christophe
• Node.js, Webpack and 360° ES: Christophe
• SwiftUI and Combine and SwiftUI Concurrency: John Sundell

Every trainer naturally meets our stringent requirements on technical and teaching skills, in order to guarantee a top-notch training experience. In that sense, any trainers greenlighted for a given course are “swappable,” even if they each have their own style.

I suck at JS, will I be out of my depth?

We get that a lot. 😊 In practice, our 360° JS and Node.js training courses do not require a “rockstar” level in JavaScript at all.

Anyone who’s spent a bit of time tinkering with JS on the front-end, even just to put together a mostly static site, a simple blog, etc. with 2–3 jQuery plugins, usually has enough background (in particular regarding the event-driven / asynchronous model, callbacks, etc.).

On the other hand, anyone coming from other tech backgrounds with a blocking execution model, such as Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP et al. will likely find the first hours a bit more challenging to them, as they’ll have to internalize completely different concepts and execution models.

We try to alleviate this by contrasting these backgrounds with JS’ as much as we can, and in addition we maintain two reading lists for people anxious to “study up” ahead of time:

• One for traditional JavaScript (ES3/ES5)
• One for ES2015+ (which we explore in detail on day 1, anyway)

Do note that in terms of the language itself, our using ES2015+ now eases adaptation considerably for people coming from other languages, compared to when we used “traditional” JS. It’s easier to get your bearings and relate to the concepts.

Do you offer discounts?

We do have four distinct types of discounts:

• On multi-client sessions at our venues, pricing has volume discounts: the more trainees you send to the same session, the cheaper each trainee is billed, down to −20%! Every course clearly displays its pricing grid.
• Our loyalty discount, which accounts for −15% of the maximum price, applies to any trainee or client entity that has paid, over the elapsed year at time of signature, at least €1,500 net on our trainings.
• During industry special events, for instance the Paris Web conference, we offer attendees a discount through a special-purpose promotional operation.
• Should we face an inordinately low number of attendees for a soon-starting training session, we may decide to launch a last-minute promotional operation. However, waiting in hope of such a discount is a dangerous game, especially because most of our sessions are fully booked way ahead of time.

However, we do not provide any specific discount for students or unemployed people. We favor providing, right from the get-go, rather under-average pricing for everyone. And most of all, we make sure you get a lot of bang for your buck!

What is Zinc’s atomic number?

That would be 30, naturally. Discovered in 1746, it melts at 419,5°C (787,15°F), which isn’t too shabby.

What is the meaning of life?

42, obviously.